


Antinous J

by Joan_of_Gender



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: (Antinous J Crowley), Classics, Fluff, Hadrian (roman emperor), Immortality, M/M, Roman Religion, Yearning, deification, kiss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-05
Updated: 2019-07-05
Packaged: 2020-06-16 13:22:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19651066
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Joan_of_Gender/pseuds/Joan_of_Gender
Summary: Aziraphale finds a startlingly familiar statue, and learns about the emperor's deified lover.





	Antinous J

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Gingerhobbit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gingerhobbit/gifts).



It was a heavy, hot Egyptian day. The barge rocked gently, making sluggish progress: its crew were just as heat-fatigued as the two men who lay on wooden couches under the awning, making the most of the little shade it offered. On all sides, attendants fanned them with glossy green palm leaves, batting away the mosquitos, offering them the slight relief of a breeze.

One of the two was bulky with muscle and nourishment. He reclined on thick, strong, sun-scorched arms that shone with sweat – arms that not a month before had proved a fatal match for the Lybian lion. He wore his age comfortably. Kindly creases had settled into his face, and his beard was picked out with occasional strands of white. He was steady, powerful, spring-loaded. His posture and mannerisms disgraced neither his nobility nor his mortality, and he commanded a heroic energy beneath his leisurely surface.

His entire attention was focussed on the boy. Though “boy” was a poor term for him. Antinous was ageless. His youth was unfathomable and seemed unchanged since the day they met in Cilicia. That must have been a decade ago – incredible, and not nearly long enough. After all this time, the emperor knew everything about him and nothing at all. The way his dark, russet curls settled against his neck, the improbable glint of gold in his eyes, his languorous drawl, all were committed to memory long ago. The syllables of his name were whispered with the regularity of prayer, in public and in private, whether he was present or absent. _Antinous_. He was just as perverse and unreadable as the name suggested. The boy was Greek – that is to say, Greece was where he came from, from where he took his name. But as to what he really was…

Maybe the emperor was a romantic, but he had begun to suspect divinity. Those golden eyes. His invulnerability to time. Of all the men he’d ever met, Antinous alone was neither overawed by his power nor jealous of it. When the emperor asked his counsel, the boy never replied for his own advancement, but only ever for Hadrian’s health and happiness. Aside from their love for each other, Antinous seemed detached from the world, as if for the most part its daily troubles were too small to trouble him. He was wise, beautiful, and sometimes cruel.

Tracing the lines of his beloved’s body once more with his own dim eyes, the emperor wondered whether what he felt was love or religious fervour. He wanted Antinous even with him mere stades away, couldn’t bear it. Everything of him was not enough, anything was too much. He longed for night to fall on the Nile, for them to be alone again below. The gentle rocking of the river teased him. The sun a copper halo on Antinous’ hair, the dappled reflections bouncing up onto his pale skin like veins of marble. He was the emperor, bulwark of the Roman people. Nothing had ever overwhelmed him. _Antinous_.

Shouts broke into his consciousness. Sudden movement of the attendants, someone leaping from the bank into the boat, arms reaching for his love, violent arms. Rough. He leapt to his feet. They were dragging Antinous to the edge of the barge. Antinous hissed curses, struggled but did not bring his own full force against them. Hadrian rushed towards the group and felt hands on his own wrist, pulling him back. He shook them off, ran to the edge, looked out where black ripples lapped across the surface of the water, screamed, was about to dive when a monstrous serpent broke the surface of the water. Its scales gleamed, glossy black and red and gold, its eyes glinted evilly. It arched its body, spitting its own thin tongue out from between its jaws towards him, then slid away under the water’s menacing surface.

Hadrian collapsed to the deck, shaking and howling. Nobody attacked him. Nobody moved. The world around was transfixed with grief. The emperor’s grief spread him helpless on the deck, as hot and horrific as the entrails of a newly gored beast.

***

That night, as he slept below the hold, a serpent slipped into his chamber. The creature moved silently, sliding over the smooth timber like silk. It reared before the emperor’s bed –

And transformed. Antinous stood by the emperor’s side, hardly daring to breathe. Not that he needed to.

His lover was asleep, somewhere deep and heavy, troubled and oppressive. His body heaved with each breath, his eyes flicked beneath their lids, and he seemed too involved in troubles beyond to notice anything in his immediate surroundings.

Antinous locked the door with a thought, soothed his Hadrian’s sleep with a second, and lay beside him on the bed, a yawning gap between their two bodies. He waited, slowly for the emperor’s eye to open a crack. “Antinous,” he breathed.

Antinous stared sadly at him. He wanted to remember this man.

He’d said it before, in every tongue the emperor knew, but he’d never known until now how much he’d feel it. Not in the moment – he’d felt it in the moment – but down the centuries, when Hadrian had gone where he couldn’t follow. So he said it one last time, feeling it most: “I love you.”

“Are you there? You drowned.” The emperor put a weathered hand to his smooth cheek. Cold as the grave, but it always had been. “You’re divine,” he whispered. “Aren’t you?”

Antinous shifted his gaze away. “I’m dead,” he said.

“You’re here,” insisted the emperor. The boy leaned into his touch, into his kiss. It was gentle, ceremonial, already Antinous felt the distance of centuries between them.

“I can’t stay,” he said. “I’ll be gone in the morning.”

Shadows in the emperor’s face. “In the morning I won’t know whether or not this was a dream.” He looked hard at the boy: “I don’t know now.”

Antinous took his hand and led him back to sleep.

By morning, Antinous was gone.

***

Statues went up. The emperor had worshipped the boy so long, deification was only a formality, a way of bringing the rest of the world to his own point of view. Temples were built. The cult of Antinous spread throughout the provinces; although at Rome he stiffened his sorrow and worshipped the old gods with his empress at his side, afraid to let show too much of the mortal man in himself.

In Egypt, in Syria, in Greece, sculptors fashioned stone in the boy-god’s image and gilt his eyes with delicate gold leaf. Inscriptions named him _hero_ , _god_ and _daemon_ , and some of them even got it right. The star, which Hadrian named his, was indeed one of the heavenly fires Antinous had hung in the sky long ago. His name was evoked in prayer at the edges of the empire, and many believed he spoke through the local oracles.

All of which was a surprise to the fair-haired man who’d lived, for the last few centuries, in Rome. To his superiors, he claimed he’d chosen the post to be close to the seat of power. In fact he’d chosen it to be close to the vineyards and river that brought in fine fresh fish from Ostia. And the games, and the theatre! And, for one blissful summer, the poet Virgil. There was enough in the capital to occupy Aziraphale so thoroughly that he’d been quite oblivious to the story of love and loss that was casting its long shadow over the imperial palace.

He might have remained oblivious, had he not been seized with the sudden desire to travel. He realised that it had been mortal lifetimes since he’d seen a beach, a real one with fine white sand, pure green oceans banded with orange corals, and water warm enough to swim in.

Arriving as a traveller in a land he’d too long neglected, he busied himself in seeing the local landmarks and updating himself on how Egyptian culture had evolved since the days of the Old Kingdom. That was how he found himself on the steps of a recently completed temple, built in a modern style that was an amalgam of styles, borrowing from Rome, from Greece, from its own local history and bearing also the slight influence of the east. It was a small, squat, strange place; and its patchwork stonemasonry, home to a patchwork religion, set his mind drifting to the early days of Babylon when everything belonged together.

Then he saw the cult statue within.

***

_Thou shalt not worship graven images._

Aziraphale had tiptoed round the edges of several Deadly Sins (gluttony, sloth, and just occasionally lust – after all, what could be deadly to an immortal angel?) but he had never broken a Commandment.

He watched the visitors to the temple approach the statue, lay their offerings, mumble their prayers. Grasp his knees. Kneel to kiss his marble feet. It didn’t feel as wicked as it should.

He asked one, an old man, as he was leaving, how Crowley had come to be worshipped as a god.

“Crowley?” the old man frowned, forehead furrowing. He looked at the statue. “Antinous, do you mean? The emperor loved him.” He said it as if it should be obvious.

Maybe it was: all that exhilarating beauty of his? It must be meant to serve some devious purpose. How many times had _he himself_ nearly –

It made no sense. Love, not evil, emanated from the statue. When the temple was empty, Aziraphale approached, slow and sombre, imitating the reverence of the other visitors. He murmured the name, and pressed a kiss to the statue’s lips. They were cold and unyielding. He ran a thumb against the accurate hollows of the marble cheek, the sharp, familiar line of the jaw. He closed his eyes, and didn’t pray, but _imagined_ that things were different.

***

Two men stood together in the British Museum. To the casual observer they seemed an odd, mismatched couple that nevertheless belonged together in the same way that day and night belong together: neither one would make sense without the other. The stout man’s arm was around the lean one’s waist, holding him close to his side as they gazed up at the bust displayed on a tall pillar.

“You make a beautiful statue,” said Aziraphale. There was something pitifully tender in his voice. “You loved him,” he said

Crowley shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I did. But I loved you first, Angel. First, last, always.”

“You don’t have to apologise for it. Loving him.” Aziraphale was staring at the marble, not even bothering to conceal the longing it made him feel. The cold, pallid stone, that wistful smile, and that inclination of the head – the way the marble Antinous avoided the viewer’s gaze as if shy, or as if completely detached from the world – all was composed to stir longing even in the heart of someone who didn’t already love him. “I’ve loved humans too.”

“Yes.” Crowley looked at Aziraphale, the angel’s face with its soft, kindly lines. “I never understood how you could do that – how you could hand your heart over to be shattered again and again.” All those poets, all those beautiful men. He smiled sadly. “Once was enough for me, once hurt too much.”

“I suppose for me it was easier than the alternative,” said the angel vaguely. He thought about that stone kiss, how it had haunted him for centuries afterwards. He’d thought it would always be like that: his flesh, too full of feeling, aching for a beautiful marble creature, one who might as well be made of stone. He wished he’d known. Here and now he squeezed his demon’s waist and knew that nothing would ever feel lonely again.

The demon was thinking of Hadrian and Aziraphale, letting his loves ancient and present tumble about in his heart. It was strange for them to meet like this. He had thrown himself headlong into loving Hadrian, so much that it almost, _almost_ dislodged the other love. It had been too much. All that mortality in his hands. He was almost glad that he’d only seen the emperor’s age falter from a distance, never had to be near him in his last days. Wished him goodbye in advance of the real thing, although at the time it had ached. He hadn’t known there was a plot against him, but once it had happened, it seemed he could only cut himself off: falling in love, however thrilling the rush, always hurt when you hit the bottom.

He was glad he’d felt that. He might not have known how to value the stretching future if he hadn’t felt the terrible jolt of a love cut off.

After standing for a long time in silence, each thinking about their own pasts and the other’s, Crowley turned and tilted his angel’s face towards his own. They kissed in the gallery, in the unbridgeable space between boy-god and emperor. For an instant, Crowley believed that Hadrian lived, and was smiling at them.


End file.
